Letter to the editor

Jan 28, 2002

Hello? Seventy thousand employees are doing payroll by hand and the public
is cut off from the Old Faithful Webcam because the Department of the Interior's
information resources management folks can't effectively isolate a database?
["Searching for accountability," Federal Computer Week, Jan. 21, 2002.]

At the risk of oversimplifying, this ain't rocket science! If the partial
failure of a single "component system" leads to the scrubbing of an entire
department's e-government infrastructure, we'll never see the successful
launch of an integrated "e-future."

Even NASA shuttle flights orbit with more tolerance for "oops" than
the crew of Daryl White, the Interior chief information officer.

Fifty days (and counting) is a long time to have business-critical information
systems and data down. How clueless do all federal information systems folks
look as the media move this story toward Page 1?

The GAO director of information technology issues is leaving government after 16 years. On his way out the door, Dave Powner details how far govtech has come in the past two decades and flags the most critical issues he sees facing federal IT leaders.